


a map with your name for a capital

by glutamate



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Fusion, Angst, Christmas, F/F, Memory Loss, Sad with a Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:22:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28678836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glutamate/pseuds/glutamate
Summary: “Do you think…” Dani trailed off, swallowed hard before she spoke again. “Would you want to know, if you could? What exactly you forgot?”“A year ago I would’ve said no.”“And now?”It felt like Dani was asking a different question entirely, but Jamie couldn’t work out what it was. This whole conversation felt like a proxy for a different discussion. Didn’t she know Dani from somewhere? Why had she wanted to come to Vermont? What was so important about this place?“Yes,” Jamie said, barely louder than a breath. "I would."(An AU inspired byEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.)
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 36
Kudos: 156





	a map with your name for a capital

**Author's Note:**

> Is this whole setup just an excuse to have these two say absurdly sad and romantic things to each other? Who's to say! 
> 
> Canon-compliant up through the first quarter or so of episode 9. The only thing this fic takes from Eternal Sunshine (which I have not actually seen, only read the Wikipedia page of, lol) is the existence of the memory-erasing procedure.

* * *

* * *

Here is a map with a your name for a capital,  
here is an arrow to prove a point: we laugh  
and it pits the world against us, we laugh,  
and we’ve got nothing left to lose, and our hearts  
turn red, and the river rises like a barn on fire.  
I came to tell you, we’ll swim in the water, we’ll  
swim like something sparkling underneath  
the waves. Our bodies shivering, and the sound  
of our breathing, and the shore so far away.

— _Richard Siken, "Saying Your Names"_

* * *

  
  


**1991**

California was, for the most part, exactly as Jamie expected. The Wingraves had settled down in Palo Alto, which was surprisingly temperate in mid-December, not quite cold but breezy enough that she didn’t break a sweat lugging her bags into the trunk of the car Henry had sent for her. There were, in fact, actual palm trees lining the streets, and a frankly ridiculous quantity of American flags (Jamie counted five just on the drive from the airport, flagpoles stretching high above school buildings, the post office, even a car dealership for some reason). 

The Wingraves lived in one of the wealthier neighborhoods in an already wealthy town; she could tell as soon as they turned off the main road into a smaller development, which was full of sprawling, Spanish-style houses, glittering pools in the backyard and fences separating each property from the next. She wasn’t normally one to worry about looking or being out of place, but there was something a little disquieting about the shiny veneer of this place that made her pick nervously at the frayed fabric of her jeans as the car pulled into the drive, where the Wingraves were waiting for her.

A short while after all the initial greetings and pleasantries — an enthusiastic hug from Flora (thirteen now, and only a couple inches shorter than Jamie), a somewhat stiff one from Miles (who was gangly and awkward in an endearingly fifteen-year-old boy sort of way), and a formal handshake from Henry — Jamie was pressed into a sticky booth at an In-N-Out, which Flora had insisted on being Jamie’s first meal in America. 

“You have to ask for it animal style,” Flora had whispered to her as she was ordering her burger. 

“The hell is _animal style?”_

“You’ll see!” 

It turned out to mean a burger absolutely dripping in a mysterious sauce, plus pickles and caramelized onions. “I hate to say it,” Jamie said after her first bite, “but it’s actually bloody good. Might give me a heart attack later today, but it’s delicious.” 

Henry smiled at her from across the table. He kept giving her this odd, warm smile, regarding her carefully when he thought she wasn’t looking. It was unsettling. She liked Henry well enough now that he’d put the bottle away in favor of giving a shit about his family, but she wasn’t used to him trying to project _warmth_ in her direction. 

“How have you been doing these days?” he asked. “How’s the shop?” 

“Oh, you know. Everything’s going just swimmingly.” After everything that had happened at the manor, Henry had thrown money at both her and Owen, by way of apology; she’d used half of it to move back to London and open a little flower shop. Owen had taken the money and gone to Paris. Neither of them had any roots tying them to Bly, really, after the Wingraves left. “Shop’s doing great. I’ve got _employees_ now, which is weird, but good.” 

“And what about —” Henry paused. “How are _you?_ Business aside, I mean.” 

There it was again, that look. “Fine,” she said, because she had no reason not to be. “Life’s boring, but that’s how I like it. Didn’t think I’d miss you gremlins so much, though,” she said, tipping her head toward Flora and Miles, who laughed. 

“We’re glad you’re here,” Miles said. His voice was much deeper now, and only had traces of his old accent left, but he still spoke with a gravitas that belied his age. “You’ve never been to America before, have you?” 

“Nope. Never even been on a plane before. Would’ve liked to keep it that way, I literally white-knuckled it my whole flight here.” 

“You don’t seem like the sort of person who’d be scared of flying,” Flora said. 

“Not _scared,”_ Jamie said, but Flora just giggled at her. “Just, if humans were _meant_ to be in the air, we’d have wings.” 

After they finished eating, they went back to the house, where Jamie had a nap and a shower that ended up being inadvertently long (the water pressure was divine here, and the shower in her own flat back home always ended up cold by the time she got around to shampooing, so). The guest room she’d been given had an attached balcony plus some deck chairs, and as the afternoon turned to evening she sat outside and watched the sun sink below the line of hills on the horizon. 

She heard the scrape of the sliding-glass door opening behind her, and then Henry’s voice, asking, “Gin and tonic?” 

“Sure,” she said. He sat down on the chair next to her and set her drink down on the plastic table between them. “Thanks.” 

“Do you mind if I join you out here for a minute?” 

“‘Course not. Just watching the sunset.”

“What time is your flight tomorrow?” 

“Think it takes off around noon, I’ll have to double-check.” 

“Right. I would probably try to leave here around ten-thirty, if I were you. I’ll arrange a car.” 

“Appreciate it,” Jamie said. “Not excited to have to fly _twice_ in the same week, but. Couldn’t come all the way over here and not say hello to you lot, y’know.”

Henry laughed a single, short bark of a laugh. “I still can’t fathom why you would want to go so far east this deep into winter.” 

“I can handle a bit of snow,” she said, rolling her eyes at him. “That’s part of the appeal.” 

“If it’s adventure or tourism you’re after, you can find plenty of that in California alone, you know. We would be happy to have you here for Christmas, really. You shouldn’t have to spend it alone.” 

He meant well, Jamie knew, but she didn’t have the patience to explain this to him, or even the ability to put it into words. Her fingers flexed toward the packet of Lucky Strikes in her pocket, itching for a cigarette, but her lighter was all the way on her bedside table. Instead she sipped on her gin and tonic through the tiny cocktail straw. Too much tonic, she thought, not enough gin, for the conversation she guessed was about to take place.

“Vermont’s supposed to be beautiful this time of year,” she said. 

Henry sighed. “Can I ask what it is you’re looking for, exactly?” he said, in a tone of voice that implied he already had some guesses.

“Just feeling restless, is all,” she said, which wasn’t a lie, and then, “Not looking for anything,” which was. 

He seemed to accept this, or could at least tell from the look in Jamie’s face that it wouldn’t be wise to push the matter, and they sat in relative silence as they finished their drinks, occasionally making polite conversation about things like football and the weather. It stood out to her that nobody had so much as mentioned Bly since her arrival there; she hadn’t even had the sense that anyone was tiptoeing around the subject or consciously avoiding it. It seemed to have disappeared from their lives entirely. 

When Jamie brought this up — as delicately as possible — Henry said, “They don’t remember it.” 

“What? What d’you mean, they don’t remember it?” 

“Exactly that,” Henry said. “Well, they remember that they lived there, of course. But all the...events of that final year, everything with Peter and Rebecca and — you know, all of that, it’s as if it never happened.” 

“Jesus,” she said.

His words hung in the air between them for a moment, neither wanting to acknowledge what they both knew, which was that Jamie’s memories of Bly were similarly fractured.

He shifted in his chair, leaning forward toward her. “I wanted to ask you earlier, about the — the surgery.” There it was, the reason he’d been acting so strange. “I didn’t want to bring it up in front of the children.” He paused, but Jamie just gave him a hard, expectant look. “Is it — that is, are you alright?”

What she was going to say was: _right as rain, that’s the whole point._ Instead, she said, “I’ve been feeling strange.” 

“Since you got it, or —?” 

“It did exactly what it was supposed to, I mean, I’m not — whatever I wanted to erase has been erased, that much is clear. But it’s strange, having something pulled out of your brain like that.” She shifted uncomfortable in her chair. Thinking about it made her uneasy. 

“You would think that if they could make you forget something so specific, they could also clear out the part that knows you’ve forgotten.” 

“Right,” Jamie said. “That’s probably asking for too much, though.”

“I thought about getting it myself, you know. After Charlotte —” He stopped himself and sipped on his drink. “Well, that’s done with, and it’s probably too late, at this point, but for months afterward I really did think about it.”

“And now?” 

“Now, I…I think I’m glad I didn’t.” He looked at her. “Not that I don’t think you should have done it. If it was me in your place, I…” 

“Right,” she said, even though she didn’t know, anymore, what being in her place had even meant. “It’s just weird. Especially now that I’m here, it just — feels like there’s something missing.” 

Henry raised an eyebrow. “There is, though, isn’t there?” 

“Yeah. But that’s what I wanted.” 

It was almost fully dark now, save for a shot of blazing pink across the sky, the last struggling dredges of light. Eventually Henry stood and clapped Jamie on the shoulder briefly in what was probably supposed to be some sort of fraternal gesture. Before he left he said, “Good luck,” and then he dragged the sliding door shut, leaving Jamie by herself. 

* * *

By the time Jamie landed in Burlington she was beginning to think airplanes were one of the circles of hell; maybe she’d died on her way here and now she was spending forever stuck in a purgatory of turbulence and no-smoking signs. It was as cold in Vermont as Henry had said it would be. Even on the short walk from the plane to the gate, she could feel an icy gust seeping through the walls of the jet bridge, and she had to tuck her arms across herself to keep from shivering. 

She took a taxi from the airport to the small town of Woodvale, which was a scenic, quaint hamlet tucked into the side of a mountain. Jamie had seen a picture of it in a book she had, a worn tourist’s guide to America which she couldn’t remember buying but had found buried at the back of her bookshelf a year ago. The name, Woodvale, had been circled in red pen, though Jamie couldn’t remember why or whether she’d done it herself. She’d brought the book with her, and it now lay at the bottom of her backpack, crushed under the rest of her belongings: journals, a Polaroid camera, a bottle of Tanqueray, toiletry bag.

There was only one inn in town, a squat three-story building with pristine white shutters on the windows and an old-fashioned wooden sign hanging off the door. The elderly woman checking her in asked her where she was from in the same surprised tone as the Customs officer asking about her travel plans, and then, after she’d been satisfied by Jamie’s small-talk, handed her her room key. She’d been planning on pouring herself a drink, watching bad TV, allowing herself to wallow in the out-of-place feeling that had appeared following the surgery and only continued to sharpen in the years afterward. But she was jet-lagged and weary from the trip, and fell asleep fully-dressed before nine. 

* * *

Jamie spent the next few days drinking in her room and ordering meals from what passed as room service at the inn (which meant the woman who checked her in bringing her whatever she’d made that day, taking in Jamie’s rumpled clothing and darkened under-eyes, and asking if she was feeling alright). On her third day she managed to drag herself out of her well of self-pity for long enough to go for a walk. She had a map in her back pocket, which she’d taken from a little rack in the inn lobby that also contained exactly two pamphlets about Woodvale’s sparse array of tourist attractions, but still managed, somehow, to get herself lost just as it was starting to snow. 

She stood leaning against a lamppost, shivering against the growing wind and squinting up at a street sign that was covered in frost and therefore barely legible. The cold stung her face and cut through her hangover-fog in a way that was unpleasant but grounding. 

It seemed ridiculous to get lost in a town that had literally only one main street, which Jamie was _pretty_ sure (but not certain) she was currently standing on. The road was lined with storefronts bedecked in Christmas decor, string lights and wreaths and inflatable snowmen smiling back at her from their displays. There was a bookshop near where Jamie was standing, and through the window she could see the woman manning the cash register, who was watching her with a puzzled, open-mouthed expression, like Jamie was a maths problem she was working out. She looked familiar in the same way that people in dreams looked familiar; some part of Jamie recognized her but she couldn’t narrow it down any further than that. 

She didn’t realize she was staring back until the woman left her post and stepped out into the cold, and then Jamie coughed awkwardly, shoved her hands into her jacket pockets, and pretended she was looking for a cigarette in a bad pantomime of nonchalance. 

“Need directions?” the woman said. Her voice was high and soft. 

“I’m alright, I think,” Jamie said.

“You’re holding it the wrong way,” the woman said with a barely-concealed smile, nodding at the map, which was still unfolded in Jamie’s hands.

Jamie sighed. “Right. Okay.” 

“So…” 

“Yeah. S’pose I do need directions.”

“You want to come inside for a second? Take a break from, um...navigating?” 

“Now you’re just making fun of me,” Jamie said. The woman laughed for real now, with a smile that was like sunshine splitting through clouds, but which didn’t fully reach her eyes. Her demeanor, Jamie thought, connoted a kind of fragility — tired eyes, delicate features — but she was also standing outside in below-freezing temperatures without so much as a scarf on, and the only indication she was cold at all was the tinge of red at the tip of her nose. 

Jamie allowed the woman to lead her inside the bookstore, which was blissfully warm and smelled of coffee and paper. The shelves were packed so close together that there was barely enough room for two people to stand in an aisle at the same time. An orange cat wandered out from between two shelves and rubbed its head against Jamie’s leg. 

“Oh, sorry,” the woman said. “That’s Luna, she’s the resident shop cat. She loves new people.” 

“Can see that,” Jamie said warily. Luna meowed up at her, pawing at her shoes. 

The woman went back behind the cash register and put her elbows on the desk, leaning forward so that she was looking up at Jamie with that same intense, puzzled look. From this close Jamie could see that her eyes were two different colors, one blue and one brown. “You’re not from around here,” the woman said. It wasn’t a question. 

“Oh, you mean I’m not doing a good job of blending in with the locals?” She reached down to scratch Luna behind the ears, but also partly because something about the woman’s gaze was unsettling her a bit. “What gave it away?”

“Where are you from, then?” 

“England. Just visiting for a bit.” 

“Well, congratulations, you picked probably the most boring place in the world to come to around here.” 

“Place doesn’t get a lot of tourists?” 

“Not many who are actually here for the town itself. Mostly people just passing through on their way to a ski resort.” 

“Ah,” Jamie said. “That’s definitely not me. Really I’m pretty boring myself.” The woman smiled, nodded as if encouraging Jamie to continue, and for some reason she found herself wanting to talk. “D’you know, it’s the strangest thing — this is going to sound a little crazy — but I saw the name of this place in a little tourism booklet I’ve got. Circled in red pen. Dunno when I bought the thing, or when I read it, or why I thought it was important enough to remember, but. Figured I might as well come and see.” 

“That doesn’t sound crazy at all,” the woman said. 

She was having the strangest feeling of deja vu, except she couldn’t place what part of this was causing it, whether it was the headache or brain-fog from her hangover or the girl in front of her or some combination of it all. That was the biggest side effect from the surgery (although, was it really a side effect if it was just a natural result of the intended outcome?): she’d occasionally have these memory-hole moments, where the most mundane moments of her day would spark a capital-F Feeling inside her, and she’d know it was something that sparked the bits of her past that she’d had cut out of her. She wished they’d been able to take out every hint of those vague connections, too, but she knew that was impossible. The surgeon had warned her about how complex and overlapping the brain’s connections were — she hadn’t paid attention to the nitty-gritty of it, the stuff about synapses and neurons and whatnot — and how it wasn’t an exact science, the forgetting. You could cut stuff out, but you couldn’t always control what would grow back underneath those missing links.

“Sorry,” Jamie said, before she could think better of it, “if this is a weird question, but do I know you?”

“Do you — know me?” she repeated. 

“What’s your name?” 

The woman pressed her lips together and paused for a long moment before saying, “Dani.” 

“Dani,” Jamie repeated. She squinted down at the desk, where someone had carved several hearts into the wood, and traced the shapes with a fingernail as she turned the name over in her head. “No, I — hm.” She gave her head a small brusque shake as if that could clear the cobwebs away. “I must be getting you mixed up with someone else. Just felt like we’d met before.” 

Dani nodded. There was something about her that made her impossible to look away from, a particular sadness etched across her face, her eyes large and round but pensive, heavy. 

“So.” Jamie cleared her throat. “Can you help me get where I’m going, then?”

“Oh,” Dani said. She stood straight up again, blinking rapidly. “Yeah. Of course, yes, um — where are you headed, did you say?” 

“Staying at the only inn in town. Could’ve sworn it was only a couple blocks away, but obviously I was wrong.” 

“Right, okay. Sorry, I’m a little — out of sorts today. Um. Just a second.” Dani opened a drawer behind the desk and pulled out a pad of paper. “Here, I’ll draw you a map.” She sketched out a rough approximation of the street they were on, along with the relevant intersections, then drew in some arrows and landmarks that Jamie had seen on her walk here. The pen shook in her hand until finally it slipped out of her grip, clattering to the floor.

“Sorry.” 

“You alright?” Jamie said carefully.

“Sure I am,” Dani said in a high voice. She tore off the sheet of paper and slid it across the desk. “There’s your map.” 

“Ah, thanks. ‘Preciate it.” 

“Just follow the arrows. Should be pretty foolproof.” 

“Am I the fool in question?”

Dani laughed. Once again it didn’t seem to reach her eyes. She knocked her knuckles against the desk, shifting her weight visibly from foot to foot, chewing on her lip. Jamie wondered if it was her that was making Dani nervous somehow. _Too much_ , she thought. Even at thirty-three she still sometimes put on a facade around pretty women (and Dani definitely counted as one), play-acting as some sort of great flirt. She was folding the paper into her wallet, ready to leave, when Dani said, “Do you maybe want a cup of coffee?” 

It took Jamie a moment to register. “Coffee?” 

“Yeah. From here, I mean.” She tilted her head toward a corner of the bookstore that held a small coffee-maker, along with little tubs of cream and sugar. “To...warm you up before you hit the road.” 

Outside, it had begun to snow. Frost curled at the corners of the shop’s windows. If she started back to the inn now, she’d have to try to navigate amid the flurry. Jamie had always thought a real, snowy winter like this would be beautiful to see in person; now she knew it was (as long as she could watch it from a warm, comfortable vantage point). The thought came with a sense of completeness, like being here during Christmastime had been an item on a bucket list that she was now able to cross off, except she’d never really been the kind of person who made bucket lists or set lofty travel goals. Before that last summer at Bly, the future, to Jamie, had been a formless grey smear — she’d be doing the same things forever, day in and day out — and now parts of the past were that way, too. She had these sourceless thoughts somewhat frequently, and they’d never gotten less unsettling to her. 

“Don’t suppose you have any tea?” she said. 

“No,” Dani said. “I’m sorry. I suck at making it, anyway, so it’s probably a good thing.” 

Jamie laughed. “Think that’s just a side effect of being an American.” 

* * *

Ten minutes and several coffee-machine-related mishaps later (Dani, peering into the filter compartment with a look that telegraphed nervous terror: “I don’t use this thing very often.”), Jamie found herself sitting at a wooden folding table tucked by the coffee station, a steaming cup in her hand. Dani, sitting across from her, watched over the lip of her own cup as she took her first sip. 

“Mm,” Jamie said, trying not to grimace. 

“Sorry.” 

“No, no, it’s — it’s good.” 

Dani raised her eyebrows.

“It’s alright,” Jamie said. Another eyebrow raise. “It’s...drinkable?” 

“That sounds more accurate,” Dani said.

“It’s the thought that counts.” 

Dani smiled and shook her head. She had long, messy bangs that fell into her eyes when she leaned down to sip from her coffee mug, which she kept brushing back behind her ear with one hand. Another sourceless impulse, blooming in Jamie’s chest out of nowhere: she wanted to reach across the table, run her fingers through Dani’s hair herself, press their faces close enough to smell her shampoo. The thought sparked, electric and heady, until she had to bite the inside of one cheek to ground herself. 

“Have you lived here very long?” Jamie said.

“About three years. I’m actually from Iowa,” Dani said, leaning closer like she was sharing a secret.

“I’d be lying if I said I had any idea where or what that was.” 

Dani laughed. “Oh, it’s, like, smack-dab in the middle of America. Couple days drive from here. Nothing but plains and cornfields, as far as the eye can see.” 

“So how’d you end up here? If it’s so far from home?” 

“It’s kind of a long story,” Dani said. Her nails clinked against the styrofoam of her cup. 

“Well, we’ve got plenty of time. If you find yourself wanting to tell it, that is. Don’t think I’ll be leaving anytime soon,” Jamie said, tilting her head toward the window, through which they could see a thick layer of snow already settled on the ground. What had initially been a flurry was quickly becoming a snowstorm.

Dani followed her gaze and winced. “Yeah, definitely not. You might be stuck with me till this lets up.” 

“That doesn’t seem so bad, all things considered. Having you as company, I mean.” 

She stopped mid-sip of coffee and smiled into the cup, glancing up at Jamie through her eyelashes. There was a pretty flush in her cheeks which Jamie hoped she was responsible for, although it could very well have been from the heat spinning off the radiator behind them. 

“Y’know,” Dani said carefully, eyes fixed on the table, “before I lived here, I actually spent some time in England, myself.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah. For about...almost a year. Nine months or so.” 

“What brought you to England, then?” 

Dani took in a deep breath, her shoulders rising, then let it all out in one dramatic exhale. “You could say I was running from something. Had to get away from home, I thought I’d die if I stayed there any longer, so I just kind of...took off.” 

“I know the feeling,” Jamie said quietly. 

“You do?” Dani said. She had an uncanny way of making Jamie feel significant, like whatever she said, Dani would be listening like it was the most important thing she’d ever heard. Everything from her eyes, backlit with genuine interest, to the slight hopeful lilt of her voice, to the way she leaned toward Jamie with her elbows on the table, gave off this aura of urgent intensity. 

“I’ve hopped from place to place for a lot of my life because of that same impulse. Never really found anywhere to put down roots, so to speak.”

“Is that why you came here?” 

“I…” She wanted to make up some half-believable lie, something that would get the point across without her having to really think about it, but after a moment’s consideration she found herself answering honestly. “I really don’t know, to be honest.” 

Dani frowned. “You...flew across an ocean and you don’t know why?” 

“No, I mean, it — the thing I told you about the little tourist book, seeing the name of this town, that was true. And it’s true that I don’t remember why it was important, but I still _knew_ it was important, and I — hm.” She covered her face with one hand. “I’ve just been feeling sort of — lost.”

“You don’t have to tell me about it,” Dani said, sounding alarmed. 

“No, I will, I want to,” Jamie said, which was new; she wasn’t used to wanting to tell people things. “Okay. You know that...memory procedure you can get? The surgery?” 

For a moment there was a silence that felt like a physical entity stretching between them, a heaviness blanketing the conversation all of a sudden for reasons Jamie couldn’t figure out. Then Dani stood up, the scrape of chair legs against the floor shattering the quiet, and said, “One second.” Jamie tried and failed not to watch as she walked to the entrance, flipped the sign hanging on the door to say “closed”, and then sat back down. 

“I’ve heard of it,” Dani said, finally. “But not in detail.” 

“Well, the gist of it is they can cut stuff out. Just...get rid of shit. People. Time. Parts of your life.”

“People?” 

“Like, memories of people. Make you forget you ever knew someone in the first place, make you forget every part of your relationship with them. All erased. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers. Dani flinched at the sudden noise. “Like it never happened.”

“And you’re saying you…?” 

“Had it done, yeah. About — I think three or four years ago, now. There’s a whole summer that’s just gone from my mind.” The relief, upon telling Dani this, was immediate, like a physical anchor had been untied from her. “And everything’s been a bit fucked since then, if I’m honest.” 

“Why’d you do it?” 

“I don’t know,” she said. She rested her elbows on her knees and clasped her hands together, looking down at the laminate finish of the table, although she could feel Dani still staring at her. “Can’t remember. Which is sort of the point. All I can do is hope that past-me was thinking straight.” 

From outside there was the steady rhythmic sound of car tires on the ice-covered road by the shop, the glare of headlights briefly flashing in the window, the occasional honking horn, signs of life marching on even as the snow fell faster and thicker. Jamie suddenly felt very alone, all by herself in a strange part of the world with not even her own mind, really, for company. 

“It must be scary,” Dani said. “To not know what you don’t remember.” 

No one had acknowledged that to her before. “Yeah. It is.” 

“I don’t understand how it’s even possible for them to do that.” 

Jamie laughed, but there was no humor to it. “Me either. They tried to explain it to me. D’you know, they give you these little informational pamphlets when you make your appointment. All glossy and pretty, with photos of people, like, smiling at nothing and playing tennis or whatever, like you’ve just booked a weekend at a fucking spa resort or something. Mad. Anyway, theoretically they lay out exactly what it involves, how they do it, all that, but I didn’t pay much attention to any of that. I imagine I just wanted it — whatever it was — out of my head, and didn’t much care how they did it.” She hadn’t known how angry the whole thing had started to make her until this moment, talking about it, and she wondered how long this anger had been sitting under the surface, waiting for an audience.

One of Dani’s hands rested on the table between them, her fingers flexing and tapping absently. Jamie, on an impulse, placed her own hand on top of Dani’s, just to steady it, and probably to steady herself, too. It was the first physical contact they’d shared but it felt easy, natural, like her body was acting from muscle memory. Dani’s hand was cold, her skin soft under Jamie’s rougher, calloused palm. 

“The thing is,” Jamie said, “ever since I got it, it’s like — like my brain _knows_ something is missing. I s’pose that makes sense, looking back. Can’t just pretend something never happened with no collateral damage, especially if it was important enough that you’d want to forget it. It’s just — it’s like having an itch that I can’t scratch, and I find that I’ll have these moments where I’m feeling something and I can’t tell why, probably because I’m trying to grasp at something that just isn’t there anymore.” 

“Do you think…” Dani trailed off, swallowed hard before she spoke again. “Would you want to know, if you could? What exactly you forgot?” 

No, Jamie wanted to say, better for it to stay hidden, but she couldn’t get the words out. She didn’t really believe that, and she had a feeling Dani would know if she was lying. Instead she pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth and tried to think, hard, as if she could reach physically into the recesses and pull out a hint of what was still there. But as always there was nothing, save for an expanse of sourceless pain that was now untempered by the specifics of memory. 

“A year ago I would’ve said no.” 

“And now?” 

It felt like Dani was asking a different question entirely, but Jamie couldn’t work out what it was. This whole conversation felt like a proxy for a different discussion. Didn’t she know Dani from somewhere? Why had she wanted to come to Vermont? What was so important about this place?

“Yes,” Jamie said, barely louder than a breath. 

A row of street lamps outside turned on all at the same time, their amber light spilling in through the shop windows, lighting Dani’s face with an eerie glow. Neither of them had noticed the sun setting; the shop was dark, seemingly all of a sudden, except for the street lamps and the strings of Christmas lights that hung from every available surface. 

“Do you have dinner plans tonight?” Dani asked with a kind of forced casualness. It was a simple enough question on its surface, the kind of thing you could plausible ask a new friend (or an old one), but there was something else to it, as well. 

“Probably just going to walk around until I find a diner or something, I dunno.” 

“On Christmas Eve? Nothing’s open.” 

“What — Jesus, is it the 24th already?” Jamie said. It couldn’t have been that long since she got here; had she really been languishing in her room at the inn for days without so much as checking a calendar? “Fuck. I didn’t even...Jesus.” 

Dani gave her a sympathetic smile. “Yeah.” 

“Fuck,” she said again. “I’m a bit out of sorts. As you can probably tell.”

“Well, um. I was just going to say that my apartment isn’t far from here. And — and I have plenty of food, so. If you wanted to join me. You could.” When Jamie hesitated, Dani said, quickly, “So you wouldn’t have to spend Christmas by yourself, and all that. Unless — unless that’s what you want. Which is fine too.” 

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t want to put you out,” Jamie said. “You don’t have — ?” 

She was about to ask about Dani’s family, whether she had anyone in the area, but she stopped herself. She knew how these things could sting. Christmases, for Jamie, had been spent alone for much of her adulthood: she’d had lots as a stray runaway in London, then as an inmate, and then, after she got out of prison, as a lone wolf with no real family to speak of. At Bly, she and Hannah and Owen normally organized their own pre-Christmas Eve dinner, where Owen would make roasted potatoes, turkey with redcurrant jelly, a Yule log for dessert (none of them liked plum pudding), plenty of wine. But for the actual day itself, Hannah had Sam, Owen had his mother, and Jamie had her empty flat and a 24-hour Christmas movie marathon on TV. She didn’t typically mind being alone, but during the holidays she would sometimes wonder if there really was something missing, if she was living a half-life, a facsimile of real warmth and joy. After the surgery this sensation had only become more acute. Now Hannah was dead and Owen was in Paris and Jamie was alone with a sewn-up hole in her head. 

“No,” Dani said, apparently having caught Jamie’s meaning. “I don’t. Have any plans, or anything.” 

To her own surprise, Jamie agreed, and then Dani set about closing up shop while Jamie sat in her chair and felt unhelpful. Dani told her about how she used to be a teacher, but since moving to Vermont she’d mainly just been doing small, temporary jobs that would allow her the flexibility to leave easily if she needed to, which Jamie found enchantingly mysterious despite Dani’s refusal to elaborate (“Why would you need to leave? Are you a spy?”; “Maybe.”). She liked working at the bookstore, she said, because it was quiet. 

“You think you’ll ever go back to teaching?” Jamie said. Dani was closing out the till, counting money and typing things into a clunky calculator. 

“No,” Dani said, in a tone of voice that warned Jamie not to press further.

* * *

After Dani was done, they put on their coats and hats and ventured outside, where the snow had slowed down but was already piled several inches high on the sidewalks, and seeped in to soak Jamie’s socks through her shitty old trainers minutes into their walk. Dani had said she lived only a few blocks away; hopefully they’d make it before her toes froze and fell off. 

“I wasn’t completely honest with you earlier,” Dani said. Snow crunched under their feet as they walked. 

“Hm?” 

“When you asked if I knew you, I wasn’t — I didn’t tell you the whole truth.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jamie said. The night seemed preternaturally empty and silent, no sound or signs of life save for their own footsteps and their voices, as if the world had stopped and stood still just for this moment. Although it was well past sunset, the sky was an odd bright blue-grey, snowflakes floating down lazily, like bits of dust, to land on the ground in front of them. 

Dani stopped walking, abruptly, and turned so that she was facing Jamie. Her face appeared raw and red, though Jamie couldn’t discern whether this was because of the sharp winds or something else. “I told you I lived in England for a little while, right?” she said. 

“Right.” 

“I was an au pair,” Dani said, “in a little village called Bly.” 

For a moment the meaning of this didn’t register, and Jamie started saying, “No way, that’s where I used to —” and then the weight of it sank in, and she stopped talking. “Oh.”

“Oh,” Dani repeated. There was that weary, exhausted cast to her eyes again, that tired gaze. She began walking again, her steps brusque and hurried, so that Jamie had to half-jog to catch up to her. 

“Hang on, hang on. So we knew each other?” Jamie said, even though some part of her knew this instinctually, had maybe known it since the first moment she’d caught Dani’s eye on the street. Dani nodded. “How?” 

Dani made a sound that might have been a laugh if it wasn’t so sad. “I’m guessing you chose to forget that summer for a reason.” 

“Yeah, fat lot of good that did me.”

“You really want me to tell you?” 

“If I’m honest,” Jamie said, “I’m not sure I know what I want.” 

She’d spent so long grappling with the scar tissue that the surgery left behind that she didn’t know what filling stuff back into the hole would do to her. They’d had her write it all down the night before, the pertinent memories scribbled onto a sheaf of printer paper and left to rot in some filing cabinet. Theoretically she could call and request the records and then she’d know, but even after all these years she never had. Maybe it was a self-preservative instinct of some kind, preventing her from digging up old wounds. 

“It’s like having a phantom limb,” Jamie said, after a moment. “You know how people say when you lose a body part, you can still feel pain in the space where it used to be?”

She could feel it even then, the itch of absence, the stubborn still-bleeding wounds that wouldn’t clot. In the early days, right after the procedure, it had sublimated into the physical, easy vocabulary of headaches that she would get when she woke up from dreams she couldn’t remember. Now it was harder to pin down.

Dani nodded, the movement dislodging some of the snowflakes caught in her hair. 

“That’s what it’s like. Like I have this thing that _hurts,_ even still, but it’s gone, so I can’t do anything about it.” 

“Oh, Jamie.” It occurred to her that this was the first time Dani had said her name; the sound of it lit something hot and sweet in Jamie’s chest, so potent that it hurt, and she had to grit her teeth and focus on the cold biting at her fingers and toes to distract from the ache of it. 

They stopped in front of a small brick building covered in ivy, two stories high, a staircase with a wrought-iron railing leading up to the second floor’s front door. 

“This is me,” Dani said. “Careful on the stairs, they get icy.” Her hands shook slightly as she turned the key in the lock; it took her several tries.

Dani’s flat was small and impersonal. There was something unreal about it, like it was the dwelling of a ghost, although it was clean enough and well-maintained; the carpet looked freshly vacuumed, the surfaces dusted. There was a succulent on the coffee table, some cushions on the couch, a couple pieces of abstract art on the walls, but overall it was like a staged ad for a furniture store, save for the faint smell of cigarette smoke and a paltry fake Christmas tree, strung with colored lights, sitting in the corner. The only thing that appeared at all specific to Dani’s taste was a small framed painting of a moonflower, hung on a wall across from the kitchen counter. 

“Where’d you get that?” Jamie asked, nodding in the painting’s direction. She’d always liked moonflowers; she was a romantic at heart, as much as she tried not to be, and once upon a time she’d thought moonflowers contained all sorts of stupid metaphors about life, love, and the like. She wondered what meaning they held to Dani.

“Made it myself,” Dani said with a self-conscious laugh. 

“It’s beautiful.” 

“Oh, thank you. I’m not much of an artist, really.” 

“Can I ask what the significance is?” Jamie said. “I’m a gardener, myself, and I —” She stopped when she saw Dani’s stricken look. “Right. I guess you would’ve already known that.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Well, actually, I have my own little flower shop now. Back in London,” she said, with a wave of her hand as if indicating the general direction of London. “That all happened after Bly, so there’s something new, right?” 

Dani nodded. Her lips were pressed very tightly together, her jaw tense, and Jamie wondered if she’d said something wrong. 

Jamie sat awkwardly at the dinette table, keeping a safe distance from Dani as she puttered around the kitchen, taking things out of the fridge, pulling a few pots and pans out of a cabinet, setting up a cutting board. Now she felt like getting any closer would be an invasion of Dani’s space somehow. Everything seemed a bit upside-down, time running backwards: they’d known each other, Jamie didn’t know how, and now they were strangers. She knew it wouldn’t do any good to try to remember but she tried anyway. 

Had they been friends? No, that wasn’t right. The ghosts of those old memories felt too much like a wound for it to be just that. When she thought about the surgery in concrete terms, she pictured it like someone taking a blunt knife to a bar of soap, shaving off bits and pieces until it was done, the work clumsy and rough by nature. If that image had any basis in reality, there were bound to be some loose sharp edges left behind, although they’d never been as stark as they felt right now. 

“Can I help at all?” Jamie asked finally, when she could no longer bear simply watching Dani’s hands, nimble and slim, snapping stalks of asparagus in half. 

“I don’t remember you being much of a chef,” Dani said. 

“Oh, that’s not fair. You would’ve been comparing me to Owen, that’s not a fair measure of my skill at all.”

She thought she could see the hint of a smile on Dani’s lips. “How is Owen? I haven’t really...been in touch.” 

“He’s in Paris now,” Jamie said. 

“Really?”

“Yeah, he finally opened up that restaurant.” 

“Wow.” Dani smiled down at the carrot she was chopping. “Good for him, he deserves it.” 

“It’s called ‘A Batter Place’, if you can believe that.” 

“Oh my _God.”_

Dani finished the prep for whatever it was she was making — Jamie hadn’t been paying much attention to how exactly she was putting the ingredients together, too busy instead cataloguing things like the little crease that appeared between Dani’s eyebrows when she frowned, or the rapid pace she set as she walked around the kitchen — and then put it in the oven. She slipped off her oven mitts, placed them back in the drawer, put the knives and cutting boards in the sink, all without looking at Jamie. 

Then, finally, after the silence had grown so torturously heavy that Jamie thought she might suffocate under the weight of it, Dani said, “You took me to see the moonflowers you planted, once. At Bly.” Her voice was quiet, small. “That was the first...first night we spent together.”

 _Shit_. “Ah.” Jamie swallowed against her sudden dry throat. “I’m sorry.” 

“For what?” 

“For...I don’t know. For asking. Not remembering.” 

“Not your fault,” Dani muttered. 

_The first night we spent together,_ Dani had said, which only opened up about a thousand other lines of questioning. Spent together _how,_ for one thing, and how many nights had there been after that, and why hadn’t there been more, and what did it mean? Her patch of moonflowers had been her favorite spot on the grounds at Bly. It had to have meant something.

“Tell me something else,” Jamie said. 

Dani shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Please. Just one more thing.” 

There were flashes of things that came to her on their own, sometimes. Little scraps of moments, not solid enough to even qualify as memories, that would appear to her from time to time, in dreams or triggered by minutia or sometimes for no reason at all. A voice, an image, a feeling: _You promise? — Promise._ Ghosts of a life she used to live. 

“Mind if I put on some music?” Dani said, bypassing the question entirely. 

“Sure.”

There was a small portable radio sitting next to the kitchen sink, which Dani now turned on and fiddled with until it was tuned to a station currently playing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, the Frank Sinatra version. She took a bottle of red wine down from a shelf above the stove, along with a corkscrew, which she fiddled unsuccessfully with until Jamie stood and said, “Here, let me.” She popped the cork off, as Dani watched, and poured them each a generous glass. 

“You hated the way I made tea,” Dani said abruptly. 

“Pardon?” 

“There’s the one more thing you asked for.” She looked up, finally met Jamie’s eyes. “I tried to make tea a couple times, at Bly, and you were never afraid to tell me how much I sucked at it.” 

“That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?” Jamie said.

Dani made a noncommittal sound. “I mean, it was true.” 

“Don’t mean to rub salt in the wound, but based on that coffee you made I’d say your hot beverage skills haven’t improved much.” 

Dani laughed. It sounded more genuine now, less like a nervous attempt to deflect. Jamie liked the sound of it. 

They took their wine, along with the radio, to the living room, where they sat at opposite ends of the same couch with their legs spread in front of them so that their shins almost touched. Something had softened between them, Jamie thought. She could see why she would have liked Dani, before. But she couldn’t remember if she’d erased that summer specifically to get rid of _Dani_ or if Dani had just been collateral damage, erased during an attempt to cut out that time in her life wholesale.

It took Dani all of one glass of wine to lean forward, mouth reddened and face slightly flushed, place a hand on Jamie’s knee, and say, “I know this is weird in a million different ways, but I feel like I’m gonna die if I don’t ask. How have you _been?”_

The more Dani touched her, the more certain Jamie was that there’d been something more between them than just coworker-level affection. At least, the person Jamie was _now_ would not have been able to spend months around Dani — her intense eyes, that thousand-megawatt smile — without falling hard. Already she could feel her heartbeat quickening as one of Dani’s nails scratched absently at her jeans. 

“I’ve been —” She took a sip of her wine so that she could look away from Dani’s face, maybe get a moment of respite. “Been good, yeah. Doing alright.” 

“You said you had your own flower shop now?” 

Jamie nodded. “In London. Other than that, though, life’s a bit boring, I suppose. I mean, I don’t do much other than work, which is fine. I like boring.” She was rambling. Being the focus of Dani’s sustained attention felt like standing in the brightest, hottest spotlight in the world. “I do miss Bly though, to be honest. Without Owen and — and Hannah, it’s — there’s not a lot of people I know very well, anymore. Which is — again, it’s fine. That’s my choice. Keeping my circle small, and all, but. I don’t know. Things are just different.”

“Yeah,” Dani said. “Yeah, I get that. I’ve been on my own too, since Bly.” She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and falling with it. “I, um...I’ve missed you.” She was looking at Jamie as if this was the most important thing she’d ever say to her. “I know you can’t say the same, for obvious reasons, but I want you to know that. That I’ve missed you.” 

The unfortunate thing was that Dani was right; Jamie couldn’t honestly reciprocate. She could tell that she missed _something,_ though. The part of her that was left empty and wanting after the surgery, it felt like it had never stopped yearning for whatever had been cut out. She wondered if that was why the last few years had felt the way they had: bleak, grey, every day fading into the last. 

Just as she was about to say something, the oven timer went off, and its shrill beeping shattered whatever moment had been about to take place between them. Dani smiled uneasily, put her now-empty wine glass down, and went to pull their food out of the oven. 

Dinner was probably delicious, but Jamie barely registered the way it tasted or what it even consisted of, unable to think about anything that wasn’t Dani. They ate in the living room with the TV on, which provided the background hum of some nondescript Christmas special, and maintained a polite facsimile of normal dinner-time conversation, talking about movies they’d seen recently, the boring parts of their jobs, the Gulf War, _Twin Peaks,_ the Soviet Union, things neither of them seemed to care much about, but it was a relief to be able to pretend things were normal for a little bit longer. When they were done eating, Dani took both their plates to the kitchen, where Jamie stood by her and started putting things in the dishwasher after Dani rinsed them. 

“Oh, thank you,” Dani said, sounding surprised. “You don’t have to help.” 

“Least I can do in exchange for eating your food and tracking snow into your home.” 

Dani smiled. “It’s not like that.”

She wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, but she thought she could see Dani sneaking furtive glances at her when she thought Jamie wasn’t looking: one when Jamie bent to open the dishwasher, one when she grabbed a tea-towel from across the kitchen to dry her hands, her gaze flitting away as soon as Jamie looked back in her direction. The third time she didn’t avert her eyes fast enough, and Jamie caught her staring over the kitchen counter, which she was wiping down with a sponge. Immediately Dani looked back down with an embarrassed chuckle.

“You know you’ve been scrubbing the same spot for a full minute,” Jamie said, pretending she couldn’t feel the tips of her own ears growing hot. 

Dani looked down at the sponge like she’d just realized it was there. “I — oh. Sorry.” 

“For?” 

“I wasn’t staring at you in, like, a weird way,” she said. “It’s just. Hard to believe you’re actually here.” 

Jamie didn’t know what to say to that, so she remained silent while Dani finished cleaning the kitchen, watching the night sky through the windows. She felt like she’d just woken up from a dream, one of those dreams that you can’t recall all the way in the morning but that leaves a strong impression on you anyway, and you wake up with the aftertaste of it still in your mouth. There was that sense of recognition, somewhere in her bones, that told her that some part of her already knew what she and Dani had been to each other, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. 

It was a little before nine o’clock, according to Jamie’s watch. Reluctantly, she said, “Should probably be getting back to the inn.” 

Dani fixed her with an incredulous look. “Are you kidding? There’s, like, half a foot of snow outside.” 

“I’ll be alright.” 

“I’m not gonna let you freeze to death when I have a perfectly good pull-out right here,” Dani said, nodding at the couch, and then minutes later she was reaching into a linen closet for an extra blanket and a pillow. Jamie poured herself some more wine and tried to will herself the courage to ask the question she kept returning to in her head. Finally, after Dani had finished bustling around and was perched on the very edge of the recliner, Jamie drained the rest of her glass and cleared her throat. 

“Were we,” she said, and then stopped. “Will you answer just one more question? About before?” 

There was that exhausted look in her eyes again. Jamie wondered what, exactly, was weighing her down so palpably. Once upon a time, maybe she would’ve known. “Depends on the question.” 

She considered her phrasing carefully, all too aware of how tightly Dani’s palms were pressed to her kneecaps. After a moment she decided on the simplest version of it. 

“We weren’t just...coworkers at Bly, were we?”

Dani took a breath. “No,” she said. “We weren’t.”

_(You promise?_

_Promise.)_

“Were we friends?”

“Yes.”

“More than that?”

At that, Dani looked up, straight into Jamie’s eyes with a propulsive, urgent expression. “You really don’t remember any of it,” she said, which Jamie took as a _yes, more than that._

She shook her head, feeling like she’d just answered a very easy test question wrong. “I wasn’t exaggerating when I said they literally cut stuff out. It’s all gone. Snipped away.” 

Dani blinked and then gave one sharp nod. “Okay.” 

“But I still — I don’t know. I feel — things, sometimes. Like ghosts of memories, almost.” 

“Like what?” 

“Like...well, I told you, this place, I...I mean, how d’you suppose I knew to come here? To find you?” The book she’d had, the earmarked page, the underlined name. “Did you ever talk about coming here?” 

“I did,” Dani said. “We — we talked about it.” She kept drawing her bottom lip into her mouth, chewing on it so hard Jamie was afraid she’d draw blood. “We were going to come here together. You really wanted to. Vermont, I mean, specifically.” 

“We were…” Now that Dani had said it out loud, she thought she recognized that fact, could begin to feel for it in the recesses of her mind. “I was going to come here with you?” 

“Yeah.” 

“So it was serious,” Jamie said. She could feel her heart beating in her throat. “Like, really serious. Whatever we had between us.” 

“It was,” Dani said, and now Jamie was sure she wasn’t imagining the sadness in the lilt of Dani’s voice.

She wanted another glass of wine, although after two she could already feel the pleasant numb flush of her buzz in her face, lulling her into being braver than she would have been otherwise. She wanted a cigarette, she wanted to feel like a real person again, and more than anything she wanted to be nearer to Dani. She wanted Dani to sit across from her on the couch and put her hand on her knee the way she had before dinner.

“Why would I have wanted to forget that?” Jamie asked. 

“I don’t know,” Dani said. “You know I can’t answer that for you.” 

“And you won’t tell me what happened.” 

Dani didn’t have to say anything for Jamie to know the answer was still _no._ “It won’t feel right. It’s going to feel like I’m — forcing a version of yourself onto you that doesn’t exist anymore.” 

“I don’t even know what version of me exists right _now,”_ Jamie said. “Look, can I be really, really honest with you for a second?” 

“Of course,” Dani said, without hesitating. 

“I think I lost something important.” She had to look down at her knuckles to get this next part out, because looking at Dani was causing something to swell in her chest that was almost painful, about to burst out of her ribcage. “I’ve always been fine on my own, but the last few years, I...I don’t know. I’m lonely in a way I’ve never been before, like I’m missing something I used to have. And...I don’t _remember_ you, but it’s like I recognize you, you know? Around you I feel...real for the first time in a really long time.”

The little frown line had reappeared between Dani’s brows, her eyes shining like polished glass. She leaned forward like she wanted to say something and then looked away with an odd, wobbly expression that made her face look like it couldn’t decide what feeling it wanted to project. Finally she said, “Okay. This is...I can’t, I’m sorry, I — can’t.” 

“Can’t what?” Jamie said, watching as Dani stood and collected her wine glass. 

“Can’t do this. Can’t sit here with you and talk about this like any of it is normal,” Dani said, her voice growing gradually higher and closer to the edge of hysteria. She carried the wine glass to the kitchen and rinsed it, scrubbing it down almost violently with the sponge for far longer than necessary. 

“Dani.” 

“Don’t, seriously, you don’t — you can’t know what this feels like.” 

“Then tell me,” Jamie said, pleading even though she didn’t entirely know why. 

Dani shut the tap off and placed the wine glass upside down by the sink to dry, shook her hands off in a way that was unfairly alluring given the circumstances, and looked, finally, at Jamie. “Do you mind if I go to bed,” she said, her voice wavering. 

Jamie nodded numbly. “D’you — if you want me to leave, I can.” 

“No,” Dani said, “of course I don’t want you to leave.” 

Now the only light in the room was the colorful glow of Christmas lights, which threw parts of Dani’s face into sharp shadow, darkening the planes of her face until her features appeared ghostly and haunted. She opened and closed her mouth like she wanted to say more, but instead just straightened her spine and held her chin a little higher, and said, “Goodnight, Jamie.”

“Hang on, wait,” Jamie was trying to say, but by the time she got her voice to work Dani was already at the threshold to her bedroom, disappearing into the dark, closing the door with a final-sounding click. 

Jamie sat on the couch for what felt like an eternity, watching headlights come through the window and roll across the ceiling, shifting uncomfortably under the scratchy blanket, and trying to identify what she was feeling. She had always thought of herself as someone who, although prone to private bouts of infatuation and occasionally stupid decisions as a result, was ultimately quite grounded, in touch with her emotions, able to parse them logically. Her prison shrink had found that impressive. It was discomfiting, then, to be subjected to impulses she didn’t understand and couldn’t trace the root of: a craving like a hunger pang for the taste of Dani’s skin, a pull toward the closed door of Dani’s bedroom, stronger and stranger than anything she’d ever felt. 

* * *

A dimly lit hallway. Girl in a pink sweater swaying in her direction. Something was wrong but she couldn’t tell what. She’d made a decision. The wrong decision? No — wrong only in hindsight, she couldn’t have known. A magnetic crackling in the air, like ozone before a storm. Something was wrong. Promises being made that wouldn’t be kept. A girl standing in front of her, eyes lit with giddy-drunk glee, small nervous smile. Asking for something. _You promise?_ She’d promised. When had it gone wrong. She couldn’t remember. Fade to black, then: sudden shift into a greenhouse — the greenhouse — her greenhouse — again that same girl with her nervous smile. Clink of coffee mugs, smell of fresh rain. _I like my life the way it is_ . So many almosts, so many missed chances. _Another night, another time,_ and then no more nights. 

* * *

Jamie woke up to the digital clock on the entertainment center blinking 3:03 AM at her in angry red block letters. Before she had a chance to re-acclimate to the world of the waking, she closed her eyes again and tried to remember what she’d been dreaming of. It was one of those dreams that left her with a warm, blurry feeling of peace that carried over even after waking; she’d had dreams like this intermittently over the years but was never able to remember them until now, when she thought she could retrieve faint snatches of images. She’d been dreaming of a woman who looked like Dani. Was Dani, maybe, but different: eyes both blue, brighter, less weighed down. 

She thought she heard the squeak of a door hinge, and then seconds later she definitely heard something go crashing to the ground from the kitchen’s direction, followed by a whispered curse. 

“Hullo?” she mumbled.

There was silence for a moment. Jamie leaned over the edge of the couch and flipped the switch on the table lamp. Dani was standing self-consciously still in front of a toppled metal vase, looking apologetic. “I’m so sorry,” she said, whispering for some reason, as if Jamie wasn’t already awake. 

Jamie rubbed at her eyes and propped herself up on her elbows. “You alright?” 

“Yeah, yeah.” She knelt to pick up the vase, then went into the kitchen and began looking through drawers, moving with a nervous energy that made Jamie jittery just from looking at her. “I’m looking for...a-ha,” she said, holding up a Zippo. “Got it. I’m sorry, again, I — well, I was trying to be quiet, but, y’know.” 

“S’all good. I was awake anyway.” Jamie nodded toward the lighter. “Bit late to be smoking, isn’t it?” 

Dani shrugged. “I guess so,” she said, but she pulled out a packet of cigarettes anyway, tapped one out into her hand, and lit it. Jamie watched her put it in her mouth, her chest rising slightly as she inhaled.

“Can’t sleep?” 

“Mm-hm. I haven’t slept through the night in a really long time, though. I always wake up feeling awful, and then I need to...walk it off before I can go back to bed again.” 

Maybe that was why she looked so profoundly tired, Jamie thought, although she didn’t think lack of sleep alone could really do that to a person. “Me too,” she said. 

“You want one?” Dani held up the packet. 

“Sure,” Jamie said. She stood, wincing at the way her joints popped when she stretched — was she officially old now? — and joined Dani in the kitchen, accepting a cigarette, which she held in her mouth for Dani to light. She tried not to look too closely at Dani’s face as she did this, at the glow of the ember reflected in her eyes or the puckering of her lips around her own cigarette, but she also couldn’t look at Dani’s hands — one flicking the lighter on, the other cupped around the flame — because that made something in her chest swell like a balloon about to burst. The process seemed to take Dani longer than it should have, and when it was done she drew back slowly, and that, too, made Jamie’s chest hurt. 

It was all just hurt, really. She was one big wound, scarred over. 

“I didn’t mean to freak out on you like that,” Dani said. She leaned back against the counter. “Earlier, I mean.” 

Jamie shrugged. “Figured you had your reasons.” 

“Maybe, but I shouldn’t be...shutting you out, or shutting down. Like, of course you’d want to know what happened. And I think you deserve that, I just — mm.” She shook her head. “It’s just a lot.” 

Jamie considered this for a moment. “I don’t think you owe me anything, if that’s what you’re saying.” 

“No, it’s not like that, it’s — I want to tell you. I want you to know.” She took a long pull from her cigarette, let the smoke drift out of her mouth rather than exhaling it. “Just give me a little time. To figure out how to tell the story.” 

How to tell the story, indeed. She thought she could feel out the edges of it, somewhere in the recesses of her mind. The outline, the shape of it. But she didn’t need to know the story to know what she was feeling just then, which was an inability to keep her eyes off Dani’s lips, a pull toward her that was magnified by how groggy she still was, the way her sleepiness seemed to blur the rest of the world until Dani looked like the only real thing in the room. 

She waited until Dani put out her cigarette in the sink, and then said, carefully, “Should probably get back to bed. I keep thinking about doing something really stupid.” 

“What’s that?”

“Keep thinking about kissing you.” 

Dani gave Jamie a small, almost imperceptible smile. “Oh.” 

“Yeah. So, ah…” She clicked her teeth and tilted her head toward the couch, swaying on the balls of her feet. “Think I should maybe...get out of your vicinity for the night.” 

Dani’s throat bobbed up and down as she swallowed. “I wouldn’t stop you,” she said. “If you kissed me.” 

_Fuck_. “Ringing endorsement, there.” 

Dani laughed. “No, I — I mean I don’t know if it’s a good idea, which is the only reason I haven’t — done it already.” She cleared her throat. “But if you did, you know, I wouldn’t...it would be okay, with me, is what I’m trying to say.” 

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jamie said. This was easy, the flirting, watching Dani grow increasingly flustered while Jamie stood with one hip against the counter, smiling at her out of the corner of her mouth. This was familiar. “Y’know, I can see how I would’ve fallen for you. Bet I fell hard and fast, didn’t I?” 

“We did move pretty quickly,” Dani said. 

“Yeah. Makes sense. Even now, already, I —” She paused, considering it. “Although I guess I don’t know if what I’m feeling right now is because I felt it before or if you’re just that goddamn charming.” 

Dani chuckled and looked at her feet. “For what it’s worth, you’ve gotten no less proficient at making a girl blush.” 

“Funny, because I’m quite out of practice.” 

“Really? The past few years, you haven’t — ?” 

“No,” Jamie said. “No one else. If that’s what you’re asking.” 

“Sounds lonely.” 

“It was.” Then, realizing what she’d said, she corrected herself: “It is.” 

If they’d been as close as Dani said they were, Jamie might have already told her the parts of her story that no one else really knew (which was to say, all of it). She would’ve known that Jamie had led a largely solitary life, would have known about her family (or lack thereof), the foster homes, possibly even the prison time. She wanted to ask, but didn’t know how to do so in a way that wouldn’t underscore the absurdity of the situation: _hey, weird question, but can you give me an itemized list of everything you know about me, so I don’t repeat myself?_

She didn’t think, talking to Dani now, that there was any part of her that she wouldn’t want Dani to know. It was a terrifying feeling, wanting to be known so deeply. If Dani were to ask about any of it, Jamie had the sense that she’d just start talking and maybe never want to stop. 

Dani was regarding her with a look of such soft adoration that it made Jamie feel a little dizzy. The edges of her features lined in silver moonlight, her mouth slightly open, that heady wanting look in her eyes: it all looked like a scene Jamie had been a part of before, in that familiar formless way that she was learning to get used to. She took a small step closer, just so she could look more deeply at Dani. 

“Have I changed much, since you knew me?” she asked. 

“Not in the ways that matter,” Dani said. “Not the parts of you I liked the most.”

“But in some ways, I have?” 

“Yeah.”

She was acutely aware, all of a sudden, of each one of Dani’s breaths, her chest rising and falling, each just a little quicker than the one before. “Like what?” 

“Like, um...I don’t know, you’re a little quieter now. Not in a bad way, you were perfect — perfect enough before.” She cleared her throat self-consciously.

Jamie raised her eyebrows, hoping this would hide how hard her heart was beating. “Perfect?” 

“Y-yeah,” Dani said. There was a beat of silence during which Dani chewed on her bottom lip, and then, she said, “I was going to...qualify that, or try to take it back, but honestly, it’s the truth. There wasn’t — isn’t — a thing about you I didn’t like.” 

She could do it, Jamie thought. She could easily lean in and kiss the rest of Dani’s words out of her mouth, breathe the smoke out of her lungs. At this point there was maybe a foot of distance separating them, barely. It felt like her body had been reduced to simple pure wanting, like a collection of iron filings near a magnet, spinning and jumping in their haste to move along a pre-ordained path. 

“And...I don’t know how this is possible,” Dani said, then, her voice growing lower until she was whispering, “but somehow you’re even more beautiful now than I remember.” 

She had the sense, then, that something physical in her had shifted — some delicate fissure either broken apart or come together at last, she couldn’t tell, but whatever it was it felt very final, irrevocable as a blood oath — and she thought she might disintegrate if she wasn’t closer to Dani in that moment, so she leaned in, finally, to kiss her. At first all she did was close her eyes and put their faces together, so she could feel Dani’s nose and forehead brushing her own, and then there was the soft press of Dani’s lips, cotton-candy-feather-sweet. 

“Jamie,” Dani said, into the kiss. She’d never heard her name said like that before, a plea and a warning and a prayer all at once. 

She wound her fingers in Dani’s hair and pulled her in to kiss her again, a little more insistent this time. She’d intended to keep it somewhat chaste, but then Dani grasped the front of her loose t-shirt (which actually belonged to Dani, and had been loaned to Jamie for the night) with one hand, curled the other around the back of her neck, and tugged her closer, and what little was left of her self-control evaporated comically fast. Dani made a small hungry sound at the back of her throat and opened her mouth and then the kiss evolved into something _real_ , something composed of messy heat and want and those tiny irresistible fucking noises Dani kept making, driving Jamie nearly out of her mind, and she closed her eyes and let herself stop thinking for the first time in fucking forever so that her world was reduced to Dani on her tongue and in her arms and all around her, blooming as brief and beautiful as moonflowers, and out of nowhere it occurred to her that she’d _promised,_ she’d promised Dani her company and she’d promised other nights, and — 

Jamie realized, belatedly, that Dani was pushing lightly at her shoulders. She drew back to find Dani giving her an odd look. 

“Are you okay?” Dani asked. 

“Sure, yeah,” Jamie said, a little breathless. 

Dani gestured toward Jamie’s face. “I think you’re...crying.” 

“What? No I’m —” She wiped at her cheek and found that her hand came away wet. “Ah.” 

Dani’s eyes had gone doleful and wary again; they were shining, a little red, but she wasn’t quite crying, herself. Jamie could see each of the ways she was withdrawing back into herself — hands curled near her chest, shoulders pulled high, the tense set of her jaw. She wanted to say _no, no, don’t do that, come back,_ but she didn’t think it would do any good. Once upon a time, or in another life, Jamie might have known how to pull her back from whatever depths she was descending into when she got this look about her. For now all she could do was stand there uselessly. 

“What’s wrong?” Dani said. 

She sniffed. “Dunno.” It wasn’t a lie. She’d always been a ready crier in private, a quality she used to dislike about herself before she grew out of that, but now it was like her body was responding to something she didn’t have conscious access to. “Maybe I just miss you.”

“Maybe?” 

Jamie shrugged. Was it possible to miss something you didn’t remember? 

Dani pressed her lips together, twirled her thumbs around each other. “It’s late,” she said gently. “I think you should go back to bed.” 

* * *

The next morning Jamie was awoken by sunlight warming her face and various breakfast smells and sounds. For a moment, before opening her eyes or stretching, she almost expected to roll over and find Dani next to her. She used to have mornings like this in the months following the surgery and her move, where she’d wake up thinking she was still at Bly, and would for some reason find herself disappointed when she realized she was still in her sparse London flat.

From her spot on the couch she could see into the kitchen, where Dani was standing at the stove while something cooked in a pan in front of her. Her hair was loose, and she wore an oversized sleep shirt that reached her knees. She looked unfairly radiant for someone who, Jamie assumed, had rolled out of bed not long ago. 

“Good morning,” Dani said. 

“Morning. How’d you know I was up?” 

“I could feel you watching me.” She could hear the smile in Dani’s voice. “You’re not as subtle as you think.” 

“I wasn’t —” she started to say, but well, she was. “What time is it?” 

“Ten-thirty.” 

“God.” She looked around blearily, taking in the late-morning sunlight. “You should’ve woke me up. Jesus.”

“Speaking of which,” Dani said. “Merry Christmas.” 

“Ah, shit. It is Christmas, isn’t it?” Jamie stretched, rolled her neck around, winced at the popping of her joints. “Well. Merry Christmas indeed, Poppins.” 

She sat up, swung her legs off the couch, and began padding to the bathroom. Dani had turned away from the stove and was watching her in silence, frozen in place with a spatula in her hand. 

“What did you call me?” Dani said. 

Jamie thought back to it and found that she couldn’t remember. “What — I dunno. Was it something I wasn’t supposed to say?” 

Dani stared at her for a moment longer, the pan sizzling happily behind her. “Never mind.” 

“No, what did I —”

“Nothing. It’s not a big deal,” Dani said, in a tone of voice that indicated that it was a very big deal. Before Jamie could say anything further she’d already turned back to the stove and begun jabbing at a pan of scrambled eggs. Jamie stood in the hallway for a moment, feeling stupid, and trying not to notice the way Dani’s t-shirt collar slipped down her left shoulder, so that a small sliver of her back was exposed and glowing in the sunlight. 

“You hungry?” Dani asked, after Jamie had returned from the bathroom. 

“Starving.”

“I hope your food preferences haven’t changed, ‘cause I pretty much only made what I think are your favorites.” Dani said this with a careful, practiced nonchalance, but Jamie could tell from the tension in her neck that she was nervous. (She was so easy to read, Jamie thought. Or maybe it only seemed that way because Jamie already knew her well, and all her mind had to do now was fill in the blanks.) She’d made eggs the way Owen used to, with plenty of cheese, black pepper, garlic powder and onions; strips of bacon; toast slathered in strawberry jam and clotted cream. 

“Are you trying to impress me with all this?” Jamie said, sitting at the table. Dani set a small glass of orange juice in front of her. “‘Cause it’s working.” 

Dani smiled. “So you do still like this stuff?”

“Mm.” She took a bite. Dani stood by the table next to her, wringing her hands together. “Fuck, that’s good.” 

“I was worried,” Dani said, “that I’d — forgotten what you liked.” 

Jamie wasn’t sure what to say to this. It was clear that Dani was talking about more than just Jamie’s breakfast food preferences. When she thought about it it mostly just made her sad, the idea that Dani cared enough to remember these small details, and had spent enough time thinking about Jamie to catalogue them. She thought back to the moment they’d met (or re-met, as it were) in the bookstore, how she’d had to ask Dani what her name was. How it must have felt, for Dani. In the end she just said, “Are you gonna eat or what?”, and Dani blinked as if coming out of a trance, and then sat down hurriedly. 

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry,” Dani said. 

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Jamie said, “although I was wondering if you were planning on just watching me like that for all of breakfast.”

Dani laughed. “Oh, um, by the way — I’m sorry there’s no tea. I figured you’d rather have no tea than terrible tea.” 

“You figured correctly.” She took a measured sip of her juice, watching Dani take small, rapid bites of her food. “Do you...remember a lot of stuff like that?” 

“Like what?” 

“Like...small things. What I like or don’t like, and all.” 

“Yeah.” Dani swallowed. “Probably, like, all of it.”

Jamie nodded. “Ah. Right.” For some reason the idea of this made her feel sick. She’d had to ask Dani what her fucking name was, and Dani knew her favorite kind of jam, and Jamie was the one who was responsible for it. 

“Is that...not okay?” Dani said. 

“No, no, it’s fine. More than fine. I just feel bad, you know.” She tapped her fork absently against her plate. “That I can’t do the same for you. This whole thing where you just know things about me and I don’t know shit about you, it feels like we’re on uneven ground.”

“I get that,” Dani said. “It’s weird.” 

“Very weird.” 

“Would you want it to be...more even, though?” 

“What do you mean?” 

Dani was staring resolutely at her hands, which were resting in her lap, while glancing intermittently up at Jamie through her eyelashes. “Like, would you want to — know things about me. Get to know me again.”

Jamie thought, briefly, that she wanted to know quite literally everything about Dani, everything Dani was willing to tell her and then more, but she decided that would be an insane thing to actually say. Instead she settled on, “Of course.” 

“Okay. Then I’ll tell you things.” Dani smiled. Jamie was beginning to notice that the feeling she got when Dani smiled at her — that sweet fizzy rush, like opening a soda can — hadn’t dimmed in potency at all, since last night. She wondered if it had felt like that before, too, and if it was the same every time (and if so, how she’d ever been able to think about anything else). “It’ll be kind of like starting from scratch.”

“Starting fresh.” 

“Starting fresh,” Dani repeated. “Yeah. I like the sound of that.” She tucked her legs underneath herself on her seat, so that she was sitting up on her knees, and leaned forward until her elbows were on the table. She propped her face in her hands and said, “Okay, shoot. What do you want to know first?” 

* * *

They spent the morning and then the afternoon like this: Jamie asking Dani questions she should have already known the answer to, Dani answering them all gamely, like this was just a bizarre first date. Dani’s favorite color was pink (“But, like, a subtle pink, you know? Kind of pastel.”); she’d never broken a bone; she’d been briefly engaged, before Bly (“I’m gonna save the rest of that story for later, if you don’t mind.”); she preferred wine to almost any other kind of alcohol; she didn’t even really know why she’d picked up smoking, to start — Jamie wondered if she’d had something to do with it, but didn’t ask — but now she liked it mostly because it was something to do when she was anxious, which was often. Jamie watched her face while she talked and took in her answers hungrily, filing them away, hoping she’d be able to remember them all through sheer force of will. 

Jamie didn’t ask about any of the difficult stuff, even though those were the questions she really wanted answered. _How did it start, between us?_ and _How long did it last?_ and _Why did it end?_ and most potently, _Did you love me? Did I love you?_

She thought she probably knew the answer to that last one. But they were having a good day so far, despite, well, everything, and she didn’t want to shatter the fragile peace they’d built between them by bringing it up. She could wait, she thought, for Dani to be ready to talk about it all. Secretly she thought she could wait forever if she needed to. It was disconcerting how immediately this place, and being with Dani, had begun to feel like somewhere she could make a home for herself. She didn’t want to leave.

“Honestly, I never really liked Christmas,” Dani said, leaning back on the couch and stretching her legs.

By then it was late enough in the day that drinking was acceptable, so they’d opened a bottle of wine and were passing it back and forth, drinking straight from the mouth of it. The hours had trickled by faster than Jamie had expected, and now the sun was setting. They’d done nothing all day except lie around and talk. 

“It’s all a bit excessively commercial over here, isn’t it?” 

“Oh, definitely, but I’ve been ambivalent about it since I was really young. So that’s probably not why.” 

“So you weren’t a little anti-capitalist toddler?” Jamie said. “It’d be in character for you if that was the reason, I think.” 

Dani laughed. She had her head back on the armrest, her loose hair fanning out around her face, looking like an angel’s halo. “I think the holidays just really sucked after my dad died.” 

“Oh, yeah.” 

“Christmas was just always so _weird._ It would be just me and my mom, because she hated her family, and she’d want me to spend it with her so I couldn’t even go to Eddie’s, which, I knew they always did the whole big-family-Christmas thing because I’d go over there over break and all his cousins would be there. Well, so, me and my mom would just — have our own sad little dinner in front of the TV, and then she’d get really drunk and fall asleep by ten.” 

“Jesus.” It was a useless thing to say, but Dani inclined her head and gave her a look like she’d said something much more poignant. 

“And then I’d do the dishes, ‘cause I knew she wouldn’t be up until late the next day. Clean up, make sure the stove was turned off all the way.” Dani scrunched up her nose. “One time she forgot and we didn’t realize until the whole place smelled like gas.” 

“What? How old were you?” 

“I was eight when my dad died, so. After that.” 

“That’s fucked,” Jamie said. “Kids shouldn’t have to worry about that kind of thing.” 

“You did, too,” Dani said. “Right?” 

“Ah. Yeah, s’pose so.” She wasn’t surprised, really, that Dani knew. “I told you all about that, did I?”

“Yeah, you did.” 

“And you remember, still.” 

“I told you, I remember pretty much everything.” Dani gave her a sad smile. “Is that weird? Or too much?” 

“No,” Jamie said. “Not weird.” It _was_ too much, but in a good way. It had been so long since she’d felt anything real. 

“Okay. But you can tell me, you know, if something is,” Dani said. “Anyway, I figure that’s why I don’t like the holidays. And I never had any especially good ones even after I grew up.” 

“Me either,” Jamie said. “Was never really religious, and when I was a kid I was —”

She stopped herself. After a moment’s pause, Dani said, “What?” 

“Just realized I’ve probably already told you.” 

“You probably have,” Dani said, “but you can tell me again, if you want. I’ll listen.” 

“Don’t want to bore you.” 

“You could never bore me.” 

So Jamie told her. Again, all of it, from the earliest memories she had — her dad’s tired, soot-covered smile; the winter nights when the heat didn’t work in their flat — up through her prison time, after which the story became quite boring. Sometimes she wondered why she hadn’t chosen to have the early bad stuff erased, too; but then, would she really be the same person without it?

Normally when she talked about her childhood it was with a sort of bracing nonchalance, as if to give off the impression that it didn’t bother her much anymore, and she’d skip over the more painful details. She didn’t want people to worry about her, or think she was weak as a result of it. This was different, though; now, with Dani looking steadily at her like she hadn’t already heard the whole thing, she did her best to let all that bravado go, and just tell the story as it was. After she was done she sat with her hands folded in her lap, staring resolutely at the clock on the far wall until she was sure she wasn’t going to do something embarrassing like start crying, until Dani moved from her place on the couch to come sit next to her. 

Dani covered Jamie’s clasped hands with her own. They sat like that for what felt like a long time; eventually Jamie worked up the courage to lean her temple against Dani’s arm, just barely, and then she could feel Dani’s shoulders falling loose, like a balloon with the air let out of it. 

“Can I tell you something from before?” Dani said. 

“Yeah,” Jamie said. “Please.” 

“The first time you told me that,” Dani said, “was maybe the best night of my life. It was the same night you took me to see the moonflowers. And — and you sat me down and told me about your life and I remember how I felt, knowing that you trusted me with that. That you cared enough to tell me. That night, and waking up next to you the next day, I’ve never felt so — so _right,_ like I’d finally found out what being really alive was supposed to be. I still think about it all the time.” She huffed out a single, rueful-sounding laugh. “I remember you told me you didn’t think most people were worth the effort. And it’s so dumb, but I kinda thought to myself, _I’m gonna prove her wrong.”_

So prove me wrong, then, Jamie thought. Stay with me, prove me wrong. 

“Do you think,” Jamie said carefully — everything in her rational mind was telling her to stop, that it was too soon to ask, but she had to do it — “that we could try this again?”

Next to her, Dani stiffened. “You don’t even know why it ended the first time.” 

“It doesn’t matter,” Jamie said, which was stupid — it should matter — but true. She didn’t care. She’d had all these beliefs about best practices in love and relationships, about the dangers of having another person fill up one’s own empty parts, and they all seemed so useless in the face of how she felt now. Wildly, she thought, _fuck healthy,_ she wanted real, she wanted Dani. 

“Jamie,” Dani whispered.

“Dani.” 

“You don’t — you don’t get it, alright?” Her voice wavered, lacking in conviction, like she was just saying combinations of words without understanding them. 

“I want —” 

“I do too,” Dani said, helplessly. “I do, but I — it’s a lot more complicated than what we want.” 

“ _How?”_ Jamie asked. “What else is there?” 

“It’s not _me,_ it’s not because I don’t want —” She stopped herself with a frustrated sound, and then she took Jamie’s face in both her hands and kissed her. 

It was different from the kiss the night before. That one had been gentle, warm; this was incandescent. There was a distinct sort of hunger to it, the way Jamie opened her mouth almost immediately to Dani, and then Dani climbed gracelessly onto her lap, grabbing at Jamie’s collar and pressing so hard into her it was like she was trying to crawl inside her body. She could sense that something had snapped, a rubber band that had been drawn too taut, and that every move they made, every word they said to each other, put them further along a path they couldn’t return from. Then Dani began kissing down her neck, fingers scrambling at the buttons on her shirt, at the zipper on her jeans, and Jamie allowed herself to let go of any semblance of conscious thought, to be reduced to pure bottled desire, electric and buzzing with want, just her body colliding artlessly into Dani’s, everything else forgotten.

“Can I —” Dani mumbled, without looking at Jamie’s face. “I wanna — can we — ”

“Yeah,” Jamie said. She didn’t even need to know what Dani was asking for, the same way she didn’t need to remember shit to know what she was feeling now; the answer would be _yes_ no matter what, _yes, anything, anything you want._

* * *

Afterward they lay in silence together on the couch, which was honestly too small to comfortably accommodate both of them; Dani was situated almost entirely on top of Jamie, her forehead pressed into Jamie’s sternum, both of them breathing hard. She could feel Dani’s eyelashes fluttering against her skin, her hand curled loosely around Jamie’s waist. 

“That was okay, right?” Dani asked. 

“More than,” Jamie said. Ironic, she thought, that once she’d wanted to forget Dani; now she thought she’d remember this forever, regardless of how the rest of it ended up shaking out: Dani gasping her name, Dani sinking to her knees in front of her, moaning just at the taste of her, pushing her fingers inside and then into Jamie’s mouth, her smile — dark and sly, so uncharacteristic of her, hotter for that very fact — when Jamie came. 

She’d wanted to touch Dani, too, but when she’d pulled her back up on the couch and skated her hand downward, Dani shook her head tightly and said, “Can you just hold me, for right now?”

Jamie tilted her head so that she could kiss Dani’s hair, breathe in the scent of her, clean sweat and her saffron-rose shampoo. In response Dani made a small hum of contentment. 

Something like a missing puzzle piece had slid into place. “I loved you,” Jamie said. “Didn’t I?” 

It wasn’t really a question; she thought she could feel it, deep in whatever parts of her mind had been left intact or grown back. It was a form of sense-memory, like the spark of recognition given by an old familiar song or smell, impossible to place explicitly but real and potent nonetheless. 

“I don’t know if you did,” Dani said. “I didn’t know. But I thought, maybe. Hoped.”

“Did you love me?” she asked. 

There was a long, heavy silence. By now it was dark out, but they hadn’t moved from the couch in hours and so hadn’t had the chance to turn on any lights. The room was lit only by the glow of street lamps from outside, leaking in through gaps in the closed blinds and forming narrow orange rectangles on the carpet. Everything felt very still and fragile, all the way down to the air in the room itself. The whole thing could shatter if she said the wrong thing. 

Dani drew in a sharp breath, hitching in an odd way. She was crying, Jamie realized.

“It was too soon,” she said. “Way too early to be thinking that way. I only knew you for a few months, but I…” She swallowed and closed her eyes. “I think so. Yeah.”

“Do you still?”

“Yes,” Dani said. No hesitation this time, no qualifying it. A simple yes. 

“I,” Jamie said. She didn’t know what more she _could_ say, except that she was now thinking about Dani, in this little town in this small flat, alone for three years with her love and her memories of them. “Fuck. I’m — I’m sorry.” 

Dani huffed. “Don’t be.” 

“It’s just — I —”

“I wouldn’t change it,” Dani said, in a rush. “I need you to know that. I wouldn’t take any of it back, even if I had never seen you again. Even if I never see you again after this. It’s — it hurts to think about, and it probably always will, but — that’s just the price of something like that, isn’t it? It’s gotta hurt, eventually.” 

Jamie considered this. Running from the hurt had probably been the reason she had Dani erased in the first place. It was no wonder she’d felt so horribly empty, in the years afterward; she hadn’t had the memory of Dani’s smile to nourish her, her wide eyes, her laugh. “Yeah.” 

“Can’t have a beginning without an ending.” 

“If it was you in my place,” Jamie said, “would you have done it? Had it all cut out?” 

“It wasn’t me in your place.” Dani shifted upward so that her face was next to Jamie’s, her nose tickling Jamie’s cheek. “So I can’t tell you what I would’ve done.” 

Jamie wanted to kiss her again. She wanted to tug Dani’s sweater up over her shoulders and pull off her sweatpants and push her back against the couch cushions, make wild promises to her, stay right in this spot forever. But first, she thought, she needed to _know._

“Will you tell me now what happened?” she asked. 

And Dani, eyes half-lidded in their post-sex haze, curled into Jamie’s body like she was a part of her, nodded against her, and said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”, and then began telling the story. 

(There were some parts of it that, Jamie thought, were already familiar to her, or became familiar once she heard them. It wasn’t the same as remembering, exactly — whatever had been excised had long since scarred over — but it was like seeing a photo of yourself that you didn’t know was being taken at the time. She recognized the story in a place that felt somehow deeper than memory, somewhere where the softer and more nebulous bits of love bloomed like lichen even among dead things.)

She’d known about Peter and Rebecca, of course, but what really happened with them — what Dani told her, about the Lady of the Lake, and Peter’s betrayal — had not, obviously, been in the version of events that Jamie had assumed as fact. Dani told her about how they met, how she’d been struck by some kind of magic at the first sight of Jamie; about all the things Jamie said, all their little conversations; about the first kiss in the greenhouse; about the moonflowers, and everything that followed. Finally she told her about a night at Bly when the monster had risen from the lake, had tried to drag Flora under the depths and had accepted a sacrifice from Dani in her place. 

“The thing is,” Dani said, “I’m living on what you might call borrowed time.”

“Jesus,” Jamie said, at this point in the story. “So you’re — “

“Still with her?” Dani said with a wry smile. “Yeah. She’s — I mean, she hasn’t gone away. Gotten quieter, comes and goes, but definitely...not gone.”

“Shit.” She wrapped her arm tighter around Dani. “So why wasn’t — I mean, why didn’t I come with you?” 

“Well, that was the plan, for you to come with me. We had this whole life in mind that we were gonna build together. That’s where that book is from, by the way.” — the little tourist guide, Jamie remembered — “We’d been planning out where we wanted to go, what we wanted to see. You were the one who wanted to come to Vermont. Because of —“

“ _White Christmas,”_ Jamie finished. She laughed. “Can’t believe I told you that.” 

“What, why? It’s cute!”

“Mm, sure.” 

“Okay, _anyway,”_ Dani said, shoving at Jamie’s shoulder. “The point is, we were planning. We...we wanted a future together. But the whole time I had this awful feeling that it couldn’t last, and I — ” She paused. Her voice had gone high and soft, and she was looking blankly across Jamie’s body, staring at nothing in particular. “I mean, I could _feel_ her, all this rage and emptiness, simmering. Waiting. I think she’d forgotten everything else about herself besides the anger. I mean, there was _nothing_ else, and especially in the early days when she’d just woken up, it was just. Violence, constantly.

“She woke up a lot sooner than I thought she would. I remember we were staying at your apartment for a couple of weeks while we got everything sorted out for you to be able to come here, and I kept having really weird dreams. About Bly, about the lake. That lasted for a few nights, and then — well, then I started sleepwalking. Acting out the dreams, I guess. I’d wake up in the kitchen with broken glass around me from something I’d apparently destroyed. Or — in the bathroom with the tub flooded, or something. It was always weird, scary shit like that.”

“Did I know about it?” Jamie asked. 

“Not all of it,” Dani said. “I told you about parts of it, but the worst parts, I — I tried to hide. I didn’t want to put all that on you. And...I think I still thought there was a chance you’d change your mind, that you’d decide you didn’t want to make that big of a leap with me after all. But if I’d told you how bad it was getting, for me, you never would’ve been honest with me about that. You would’ve stayed even if you didn’t want to.” 

“I wouldn’t have changed my mind,” Jamie said quietly. 

“You don’t know that.” 

“Yeah, I do.” 

Jamie turned her head so she could look at Dani’s eyes, the blue one a little more dilated than the brown one. The eyes in her dream from last night had both been blue, and hadn’t been underscored by the dark circles Dani had now, the new lines around her face that were so faint they would have been unnoticeable if Jamie wasn’t looking so closely. She kissed Dani’s forehead once, and then Dani’s eyes fluttered shut, so she kissed each of her eyelids, too, followed by the tip of her nose. 

“The last night,” Dani said, with her eyes still closed, “was actually really good, until it wasn’t. We’d spent the whole day in bed, which —” Jamie laughed, and Dani continued, “Yeah, no complaints there, right?” 

They’d been celebrating, Dani said, because some of Jamie’s passport stuff had been approved that day. It was the very end of summer, the final days of August, which had felt auspicious at the time — “A new beginning, and all that,” Dani said — and they’d kept all the windows open at Jamie’s flat to try to cool the place down, holding each other in the warm, sun-soaked sheets, unable to keep their hands off of each other even though it made the heat feel worse. 

“It was nice,” Dani said, “but I remember also being _terrified._ I mean, just so fucking scared, Jamie. I didn’t know anything about what was happening to me, I didn’t know if it’d get worse, if I’d get to a point where I lost myself entirely, or —” She swallowed hard. “So, that night, I had another dream. About you this time. It was — it was like I was in the lake, and you were there, and I was — I had my — my hand around your throat, and I was — I mean, it felt like I was _her._ Living in her mind, doing what she wanted. Following that rage.” 

“Ah,” Jamie said. 

“I woke up, and I wasn’t _doing_ anything, thank God, but I was sitting up in bed. You were next to me, asleep, I remember you looked so peaceful. Sometimes you smile a little bit in your sleep, did you know that? Or — you used to, I guess I don’t know if you do it anymore.” She paused. Jamie tried to picture it, Dani watching her sleep night after night. It felt like it had been an impossibly long time since she’d slept next to anyone. “That was kind of the final straw for me.” 

“That dream?” 

“The idea that she could make me ever think about — hurting you,” Dani said. She let out a long shaky breath through her nose. “So I left.” 

“Just like that? The same night?” 

“The same night,” Dani said. “Wrote a note, put it on my pillow. Thinking back on it, I was in kind of a trance that whole time. I got a cab back to Bly — it was empty, Henry had taken the kids back to London with him — and I just...sat with...with _her,_ I guess. Went down to the lake. I think she wanted to...go back in. To take me with her. And I spent hours, probably, just staring at it, thinking about just letting her take me — oh, don’t look at me like that, I’m still here, right?” 

Jamie pressed her lips together. Trying to remember was a futile exercise, but she could imagine it: waking up alone, rolling over to look for Dani next to her, reading her note. She wondered if she’d been surprised, if she’d suspected anything. If she had been angry or just sad. Probably the latter, she thought. She couldn’t imagine ever being angry at Dani in any serious way. 

“In the end I couldn’t do it. Obviously. So I came here instead.” 

“You should’ve —” Jamie started, and then stopped herself. “You could have told me, you know. I would have wanted you to tell me. Even now I know that. I would’ve — we would’ve gotten through it together.” I would have born it all for you, she wanted to say.

“There’s no getting through it,” Dani said. “Just living with it.” 

“Right. That, then.” 

Dani was watching her carefully, with an indecipherable expression, something between love and regret. In the low light she was almost unbearably beautiful. 

“Is it hard, still?” Jamie asked, and then immediately felt stupid for having asked. Obviously it was hard, being here by herself, being alone with a second passenger in her brain. 

“The first year,” Dani said, “was the hardest. In terms of her, I mean. But — it’s weird, it’s like she’s been calming down. Slowly, but it’s definitely happening. I don’t know what it is. If she just, like, lies dormant for a while, or if we’ve learned to coexist or something. If maybe she’s — remembering.” She laughed. “It sounds crazy when I say it like that.” 

“It doesn’t,” Jamie said. 

“At first I didn’t know how I was going to do it. All of this, all by myself. I thought about you a lot. I really only had a few months worth of memories to go off of. I think at some point the version of you I had in my head started becoming someone else completely.”

“How do I measure up?”

“You’re better,” Dani said. “You’re real.”

* * *

By the time they untangled themselves from each other it was too late to begin cooking dinner, so they ordered Chinese from a place across the street, walking over together to pick it up, their hands tangling in each others clumsily. The domesticity of it all felt at once familiar and alien. Jamie liked it, these little moments: Dani’s nose reddening against the wind, Jamie standing behind her when she unlocked her flat. Jamie tried to use chopsticks to eat her noodles solely because it made Dani laugh to see her struggling with them. They cracked open their fortune cookies and read from the slip of paper inside (Jamie’s said, “A fresh start will put you on your way”, which felt relevant; Dani’s, cryptically, just had the word “beef” printed on it, which made her laugh so hard she started choking on her wonton soup), and ate sitting next to each other on the couch.

Nothing had been fixed, only explicated, but things felt better nonetheless. Lighter, like the memories Jamie didn’t have anymore had been a physical presence, a darkness pressing down on her until she was cloaked in it. 

“When do you go back to London?” Dani asked. 

“Actually, I didn’t buy a return ticket,” Jamie said. “Dunno what my plan was. Kind of did the whole thing in sort of a fugue state, anyway. So I guess I can stay exactly as long as you like.” 

Dani had made them hot chocolate, showered in tiny marshmallows, which they sipped from heavy ceramic mugs. Jamie had spiked hers with Bailey’s. 

“Are you...hoping to stay a while?” Dani said. 

“As long as you’ll have me,” she said, which was as close to _forever_ as she could say. “As long as you want.” 

“I want you to stay,” Dani said. “I do, Jamie, I really — I’ve always wanted that. But it’s just — you have to know I can’t promise you anything. I mean _anything_ , Jamie.” 

“Do you want this, though?” 

“Of course I do,” Dani said. “I know it’s — it’s been a while, but I...the parts of me that are _me_ are always gonna want you, I just — I don’t know how long I’ll get to keep those parts, you know? I mean, I can feel...I can _feel_ her in here like she’s just asleep and waiting to wake up. I can’t ask you to tie yourself to that.” 

“You’re not asking,” Jamie said. “I’m the one asking. For you to let me.” 

She knew, now, why she’d chosen to forget. Without really knowing, she knew. It had been a coward’s choice, the easy way out, a dishonor to Dani’s memory, and if she could go back and do it all over again she would’ve chosen to bear the pain and the loss by herself, the way Dani had — but she could understand it. Waking up in that flat alone, with a note that made it clear Dani didn’t want her to come after her, she would have thought about how helpless she was in the face of it all. Would have thought about what she’d had, briefly, and would have assumed she’d never get to have that again. It made sense. 

After several moments, Dani said, “What are you thinking right now?” 

(The phrase rang a bell in a place where there shouldn’t have been any bells left to ring: _what are you thinking?,_ a question they used to ask each other all the time, not only to check in but also just because they’d both wanted, so desperately, to know each other, to share every bit of themselves.) 

“I’m thinking,” Jamie said, “that some part of me wanted you so badly that it forced me all the way to fucking America to come find you. Seems like an important enough sign to listen to.” 

“Hm,” Dani said, but there was a ghost of a smile on her lips and in her eyes. The ghost of a smile, maybe. 

Jamie wanted to tell her she loved her, but even though it was something she felt all the way down to her bones and in her blood, this thing was too fragile and new to risk it with ambitious words like that. Instead she kissed her and said, again, “I want to stay.” 

“I want that, too.” They were so entangled together already, underneath this massive fuzzy blanket, that it was like they were inhabiting one body, but somehow Dani managed to shift closer still, and pressed their foreheads together. “Jamie, I want that so bad, it’s all I — it’s the only thing that matters.” 

“I can’t —” She swallowed past a lump in her throat. ““I can’t get any of it back, you know. What happened.”

“I know.”

“And that’s okay? That you’ll...have to carry the memories alone?”

“No,” Dani said. “But it’s the way it is. There’s a lot that I’d have to carry alone no matter what.”

"I'd like to be there, then," Jamie said. Something was swelling in her chest, too much as once to put a name too. "I'd like to stay. I can help you carry it." 

The night was dark and still around them. The clock on the wall struck midnight, and just like that Christmas had ended, and it was now another ordinary day. 

"It's going to be really hard, you know," Dani said, yawning and turning her face into Jamie’s neck.

(This would turn out to be more accurate than Jamie could have predicted, in that moment: it would, in fact, be hard. The two additional months it took to take care of all the logistics required for Jamie to come to America — closing up her shop, ending the lease on her flat, sorting out visa issues and whatnot — would be hard, although they would bear it as well as they could, with nightly calls that ran up Jamie's phone bill to extravagant sums, and letters that Dani would send her detailing her favorite memories from their time at Bly. It would be hard in a delightful, this-is-real-life way when Jamie finally arrived in Vermont for good, and they had to set about reacquainting themselves and figuring out how to make a life together, how to rebuild and build anew at the same time. It would be hard, especially, when they began to realize that the ghost living inside Dani was not permanently dormant after all, but even then, Jamie would find it hard to regret anything other than the three years she spent living without Dani in her life or in her memories. There would be periods in which Dani would seem to disappear inside herself, weeks and sometimes months, even, of sharp silences and distance and then, when the episodes broke like a fever, teary apologies. But Dani, true to her word, wouldn’t run again. Whatever came — the bad days, the storms that seemed endless even though they quickly learned that they’d all pass eventually — they’d weather it all together. Jamie would bear it with Dani, as best as she could.)

In that moment, though, she could only see what was in front of her, which was Dani with her tired, hopeful eyes and the warmth of the blanket around them, and their steady breathing in sync. Their own small moment in this small world, insulated from the past and the future alike. 

"It’ll be worth it," she said, and knew that this, at least, would always be true.  
  


  
  



End file.
